Author
Topic: Facebook - pondering the unthinkable (Read 7697 times)

I told my wife this morning I was thinking of deleting my facebook account.

Of course - I know facebook will never delete my information - but at least I won't be adding to it.

It's hard to detach from facebook though - since my family is on there. And let's face it - it's one of the only ways I ever find out what my nieces and nephews are up to and the occasional tidbit from my more far flung family.

I've heard of many people deleting their FB accounts lately, including people who were using it quite a bit even very recently. G+ is one reason, and the recent changes are another, but probably the biggest reason is FB's really awful policies with regard to privacy and sharing/selling of your personal data.

If you're going to delete your account, I'd suggest deleting the content (notes, photos and videos) several days before you delete the account. I've heard deleted account is purged as long as the account is still open... and they only hold onto your stuff if it's intact in an account you ask to close.

I'll keep my FB account for now, but I won't for a second kid myself that anything I post up there is "private," and I'll always assume they'll sell any of my information they consider marketable.

I really dislike the latest changes to Facebook in how my friends' news displays. As a result, I might not visit FB for 2-3 days at a time whereas previously, it'd be up to 5-10 times a day. Why they keep changing things is a mystery to me.

the other alternative is to disengage from all the 'groups' and maybe drop my friends to only the family and a few people - and yes - treat nothing up there as "private" ha. Like anything is anyway... but still.

I think many people always resented FB's awfully loose privacy policies, but didn't really have an alternative social network so they just gritted their teeth and put up with it.

Now with FB's interface falling apart and becoming very Myspace-like in the past two weeks, plus the addition of G+ as a valid alternative, FB is following Myspace's example in yet another way: rapid exodus of user base.

I remember in the earliest days of G+, many people saying "Wouldn't it be weird if G+ meant the end of FB just the way FB meant the end of Myspace?" And many other people said, "Nahhh, never happen. FB is all things to all people. FB will be around FOREVAH!"

Who would have predicted FB, which despite all privacy concerns has been pretty good about keeping their interface uncluttered and relatively "clean" for several years, would so abruptly trash that interface and slow their system down to near-unusability?

I don't use fb a lot, myspace even less and I am seriously considering closing that account due to all their f-n advertisements and cluttered pages and things a bit harder to find (like mail and friend requests for instance and on top of that auto-approving friends? I want to turn that off asap).

I haven't gotten an invite to G+ but would be willing to check it out. I put my latest music over at bandcamp and am considering dumping my domain perhaps next year....would save me ~$106/yr but been with them for several years (powweb.com).

I am not a huge user of FB or Myspace or other social sites. I don't have the time to manage a bunch of them and would prefer to dump one in the near future = remove all tracks, then delete account a week later probably....not sure how to send info to all friends *freely* to let them know I am dumping the account.

Google+ is pretty much unusable for me.I have about 50 Google accounts and I'd need to switch accounts whenever I'd like to use G+. I cannot use Youtube and G+ at the same time, or Google Docs, or GMail, etc...

I'm having a similar issue with Google, G+ and Gmail, which is that I have two gmail accounts that I use regularly, and I'm constantly running into problems when I try to log into G+ when I'm logged into the Gmail account that's not associated with my G+ account. I heard Google was going to make it easier for users to log into two different Gmail accounts using the same browser but so far it's not working well.